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If man were all of one piece- I mean, if he were nothing more
than a made thing, acting and acted upon according to a fixed
nature- he could be no more subject to reproach and punishment
than the mere animals. But as the scheme holds, man is singled
out for condemnation when he does evil; and this with justice.
For he is no mere thing made to rigid plan; his nature contains a
Principle apart and free.
This does not, however, stand outside of Providence or of the
Reason of the All; the Over-World cannot be dependent upon the
World of Sense. The higher shines down upon the lower, and this
illumination is Providence in its highest aspect: The
Reason-Principle has two phases, one which creates the things of
process and another which links them with the higher beings:
these higher beings constitute the over-providence on which
depends that lower providence which is the secondary
Reason-Principle inseparably united with its primal: the two- the
Major and Minor Providence- acting together produce the universal
woof, the one all-comprehensive Providence.
Men possess, then, a distinctive Principle: but not all men turn
to account all that is in their Nature; there are men that live
by one Principle and men that live by another or, rather, by
several others, the least noble. For all these Principles are
present even when not acting upon the man- though we cannot think
of them as lying idle; everything performs its function.
"But," it will be said, "what reason can there be for their not
acting upon the man once they are present; inaction must mean
absence?"
We maintain their presence always, nothing void of them.
But surely not where they exercise no action? If they necessarily
reside in all men, surely they must be operative in all- this
Principle of free action, especially.
First of all, this free Principle is not an absolute possession
of the animal Kinds and is not even an absolute possession to all
men.
So this Principle is not the only effective force in all men?
There is no reason why it should not be. There are men in whom it
alone acts, giving its character to the life while all else is
but Necessity [and therefore outside of blame].
For [in the case of an evil life] whether it is that the
constitution of the man is such as to drive him down the troubled
paths or whether [the fault is mental or spiritual in that] the
desires have gained control, we are compelled to attribute the
guilt to the substratum [something inferior to the highest
principle in Man]. We would be naturally inclined to say that
this substratum [the responsible source of evil] must be Matter
and not, as our argument implies, the Reason-Principle; it would
appear that not the Reason-Principle but Matter were the
dominant, crude Matter at the extreme and then Matter as shaped
in the realized man: but we must remember that to this free
Principle in man [which is a phase of the All Soul] the
Substratum [the direct inferior to be moulded] is [not Matter
but] the Reason-Principle itself with whatever that produces and
moulds to its own form, so that neither crude Matter nor Matter
organized in our human total is sovereign within us.
The quality now manifested may be probably referred to the
conduct of a former life; we may suppose that previous actions
have made the Reason-Principle now governing within us inferior
in radiance to that which ruled before; the Soul which later will
shine out again is for the present at a feebler power.
And any Reason-Principle may be said to include within itself the
Reason-Principle of Matter which therefore it is able to
elaborate to its own purposes, either finding it consonant with
itself or bestowing upon it the quality which makes it so. The
Reason-Principle of an ox does not occur except in connection
with the Matter appropriate to the ox-Kind. It must be by such a
process that the transmigration, of which we read takes place;
the Soul must lose its nature, the Reason-Principle be
transformed; thus there comes the ox-soul which once was Man.
The degradation, then, is just.
Still, how did the inferior Principle ever come into being, and
how does the higher fall to it?
Once more- not all things are Firsts; there are Secondaries and
Tertiaries, of a nature inferior to that of their Priors; and a
slight tilt is enough to determine the departure from the
straight course. Further, the linking of any one being with any
other amounts to a blending such as to produce a distinct entity,
a compound of the two; it is not that the greater and prior
suffers any diminution of its own nature; the lesser and
secondary is such from its very beginning; it is in its own
nature the lesser thing it becomes, and if it suffers the
consequences, such suffering is merited: all our reasonings on
these questions must take account of previous living as the
source from which the present takes its rise.
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